All of those lessons you learned are important, but you didn't learn the most important lesson of them all. At least, when it comes to writing web based software.
The software package that I'm working on has about 100K lines of javascript. I don't obfuscate or play games. White space is removed, but that's to save bandwidth.
All of that code is object oriented, certainly, but it is still tightly dependent and interwoven. You can't take a single piece out and make it work by itself. All the pieces are dependent on each other.
Most importantly, that code is non-functional without the server-side components. Completely. The code is about 75% client-side and 25% server-side.
So for somebody to steal my client-side code, they would need to reverse engineer my server-side code to even start to use it. That effort would take them just as long as to write everything from scratch, if not longer.
Now, can they steal my design ideas? Sure. Copying is the best form of flattery and I enjoy being flattered. But, in the end, nobody can be a better you than you, by definition, so don't worry about copying. Either way, you don't own ideas. Where do you think you get your own ideas from, anyway? From a vacuum? No! From other people! Your ideas are simply improvements on ideas you got from other people.
I would also argue that the code delivered to your browser when loading a page is absolutely useless to anyone or anything but the browser that parses it.
You can nab a copy of jQuery or another third party lib and that won't make a difference, but the non-generic code that actually forms the substance of the app, or the experience on the page, is worthless, because that's inextricably bound to the specific design the developers had in mind - something no one on the outside will know about - and is anything but re-usable in its public form.
Maybe if you spend enough time looking at it, you can start to reproduce the idea, just like if you spent enough time analysing the actual behaviour without even looking at the code. Anyone with enough skill or talent can do something like this by eye, and they won't start with a copy/paste of the original source.
Of course, this might all be beside the point, and I do like how we're seeing more *.js libs and fewer jQuery specific plugins, and in some ways I can't help but think the progress github has made is conducive to that.
The software package that I'm working on has about 100K lines of javascript. I don't obfuscate or play games. White space is removed, but that's to save bandwidth.
All of that code is object oriented, certainly, but it is still tightly dependent and interwoven. You can't take a single piece out and make it work by itself. All the pieces are dependent on each other.
Most importantly, that code is non-functional without the server-side components. Completely. The code is about 75% client-side and 25% server-side.
So for somebody to steal my client-side code, they would need to reverse engineer my server-side code to even start to use it. That effort would take them just as long as to write everything from scratch, if not longer.
Now, can they steal my design ideas? Sure. Copying is the best form of flattery and I enjoy being flattered. But, in the end, nobody can be a better you than you, by definition, so don't worry about copying. Either way, you don't own ideas. Where do you think you get your own ideas from, anyway? From a vacuum? No! From other people! Your ideas are simply improvements on ideas you got from other people.